Early morning session at CISAC; have decided to give my hip a rest until it improves or next weekend comes, whichever happens first. Not a lot of space to work in because it was divided into two 25-metre sections and the deep half was for squad training, but found enough to manage OK. Not too upset on a morning like this that it's an indoor pool.
Left the Aranda house behind for (presumably) the last time this morning, which had a certain set of emotions associated with it. I left with a carload of goods being moved, many of them plants (fortunately this was more successful than last time I did it in the early 2000s, when I was pulled up by the police somewhere out the back of Cabramurra on suspicion of illegally harvesting flora from the national park), as well as a couple of boxes of climate records that CSIRO didn't want but we were potentially interested in.
Took a slightly different route choice home, through Uriarra, Wee Jasper and Adjungbilly, coming out on the highway just north of Gundagai (this is about the same distance as the freeway, but has about 30km of dirt and took 45 minutes longer). Haven't been this way since a couple of 1980s school camps (and hadn't been past Wee Jasper at all). Big sheep station country before you get to Wee Jasper (the biggest is, I believe, owned by Rupert Murdoch); a few once-grand homesteads near the road which have seen better days (as indicated by a couple of overgrown tennis courts), and placenames once familiar from the front of the Canberra phone book like The Mullion. (Some of the small rural settlements around Canberra didn't get automatic telephone exchanges until the mid-late 1980s, so before then the front of the book had copious instructions about which places/phone numbers required you to contact an operator, and how to do it). After the initial climb out of Wee Jasper, there's a lot of pine forest and recently-flattened pine forest between there and Adjungbilly (and a few eucalypt patches), but as with the Brindabella route, a lot of it's blackberry-infested and I didn't see anything of sufficiently high orienteering potential to be worth mapping in such a remote spot.
Another later (slight) diversion to places familiar as signs off the Hume took me through Baddaginnie; Warrenbayne and Winton will have to wait for another day. Also spotted was the
Yellow Brick Road. If you've always wondered what's at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, the answer is Benalla Electric Motor Rewinding, which I don't recall making an appearance in the Wizard of Oz.